If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know I genuflect to the church of Tim Ferriss, the author of “The 4-Hour Work Week”. His book and methods have been a constant inspiration. This talk in particular, given in 2009 at the San Francisco WordCamp, has a lot of great takeaways.

The talk centers around developing and maintaining a blog (which was helpful to me with this blog relaunch) but he also covers many topics such as efficient ways to use Twitter, researching topics to share, having fun is not wasting time and even out-sourcing his love life(!). In addition he discusses covering blog topics that are “evergreen” and timeless, and not to chase the news and current trends, which is a stance I continue to agree with and try to maintain. Check out his blog if you get a chance, a really rich community of smart people striving for improved lifestyle design.

Lots of great info in this video and a perfect primer if you are starting a blog, want to reignite your current site or just develop a community to share ideas and info with your followers.

As for news, not much happens over the weekend, so things that are posted online tend to be pretty fluffy. I find most critical things I may want to know happen on Mondays and Tuesdays. E-mail is also not critical typically. I recently read an article where a CEO never checked e-mails on the weekend. He reasoned that if he did, he would start answering them. And if he started answering them, clients and associates would be notified that they can and would reach him on the weekends and get a response. As for social networks, the more you interact the more reaction you get. So if you don’t post and comment, you typically don’t get much for responses, which trims things way down.

The one item I would suggest is to have everything ready for Monday, ready on Friday. Unless you have your task lists and items completely covered and scheduled, your mind will keep running about work all weekend, which defeats the whole purpose. Ever leave for vacation on a Friday? You work so hard all that day to have everything buttoned up that when you set off your mind is free and relaxed and ready to have some fun. Imagine having that feeling every weekend? 
What has happened to me is that I approach Monday and the work week with much more renewed energy and excitement.  I am recharged and ready to roll. As opposed to working though the weekends and having a never ending cycle, which can cause burnout. This may not work for everyone, but I am guessing that it could. Give it a tumble, if you think you can’t not work weekends because of client commitments, start to rethink the efficiency of your actual work week. Try going tech free for a stretch and see how refreshing and recharged it can make you.

Do you go tech free now? Can you do it?

On this episode of Media Artist Secrets TV we discuss the 4 Creative Career Steps. You can look at the original blog post this is based on right here.

The 4 steps are Hours, Talent, Ideas and Who.

You can also watch the show in HD on YouTube or in HD on Facebook (podcast version coming soon)

This show is all about the business of being creative, advancing your creative career and ramping up your empire. Each episode will feature creative career development advice and inspiration, cool guests, new thoughts and ideas. Join the conversation by leaving a comment, let me know what you think.

Thanks for checking it out.

http://www.FranklinMcMahon.com /  http://www.fmstudio.com
http://www.Facebook.com/FranklinMcMahon
http://www.Twitter.com/FranklinMcMahon

Which of the 4 steps are you at right now? What step do you want to be on?

Anthony Robbins: Consistent Focus, Repetition and Immediate Actions
Tony always says that “repetition is the mother of skill”, which means the more and more you do something, the better you get at it. Doing is the key, the more you actually put something into practice, the better and better you become. He will be the first person to tell you that all the self development in the world will do nothing until you actually start putting the methods to use. Focus is important as well, whatever you focus on consistently, starts to come to fruition. A lot of people spread their focus too wide or it’s constantly changing. He also talks about immediate actions. Once you set a plan in place, you must take a step or two immediately towards the goal. No delay. You cannot plan to work on it next week, the first steps must happen right away to create momentum.

Stephen Covey: Find Your Voice and Inspire Others To Find Theirs
He wrote the 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, and the quote above is actually the 8th Habit, from the book of the same name. Find what you truly love to do, find what your career path should be. This takes lots of soul-searching and exploring, and it often takes making a move, but it must be done. The next step is to inspire others, help them find out what they want to do. Help can be in many forms. The more you help others with their dreams, the more you will see your own dreams come to fruition. He also talks about sharpening the saw, keeping your skills top notch as well as focusing on what matter most to you, not urgent items pushed on you by others.

Tim Ferriss: Get Rid of the Clutter, Get Help and Focus on the Important
Tim says in his book the 4-Hour Work Week that when you work 9 to 5 for years (or decades) and then branch off on your own, you still retain all the same methods, even if they don’t work. You still get up and work at 9am (even though nighttime may be your most productive) and you still work within the 8 hour (and more) grid. Conform your new business to you, not to dated office methods. Use virtual assistants and delegate your workflow of mundane items. Stop taking in info from the web all day, go on an info-fast, most of that info is quickly dated and not relevant to your empire. Most importantly, don’t work 8 hours just doing busy work if you don’t have work, scale back and focus on what matters.

David Allen: Get Things Done by Collecting All Your Info, Sorting, Reviewing and Doing
David Allen created GTD (Getting Things Done) and it’s a great system that actually can be explained fairly briefly. Find a system, electronic or paper, to collect all your thoughts, ideas, tasks, goals and projects. All of them must be captured/collected or else your mind will keep thinking about them. Next is to process them, stuff that can be done in 2 minutes, just do them, things that need to be scheduled for a certain time or location, track them. Work through these 5 steps: Collect, Process, Organize, Review and Do. Put items into these 6 areas of focus: Current Actions, Current Projects, Areas of Responsibility, Yearly Goals, 5 Year Vision and Life Goals.

Saying the above items are the tip of the iceberg is an understatement. Google them all, read what they have to say, get their books and products. Check out their blogs. Even if you just start with one, most anything by any of these four will be highly enlightening and will definitely help you ramp up your career to where you want it to be.

Google: Anthony Robbins, Stephen Covey, Tim Ferriss and David Allen

Websites: Anthony Robbins, Stephen Covey, Tim Ferriss and David Allen

Of course these are my interpretations of my favorites, do you have any favorite methods? Or favorite authors?

Franklin McMahon Show #2 – Creative Career And Being Shameless..this episode is about being OK with being shameless, not being humble and ramping up your creative career by being confident.

Are you shameless? Leave a comment!

You can also watch the show in HD on YouTube or on Facebook (podcast version coming soon)

This show is all about the business of being creative, advancing your creative career and ramping up your empire.

Each episode will feature creative career development advice and inspiration, cool guests, new thoughts and ideas. Join the conversation by leaving a comment, let me know what you think.

I will also be looking for guests to interview in the coming weeks, if you are interested, please leave a comment with your links. The show will be a work in progress, but I plan on making it informative and fun.

Thanks for checking it out.

http://www.FranklinMcMahon.com
http://www.fmstudio.com

http://www.Facebook.com/FranklinMcMahon
http://www.Twitter.com/FranklinMcMahon

I’ve been talking to people about this a lot lately, it’s worth discussing here. I always recommend that if you have a lack of talent in a particular area, you should get help, either someone to help you or hire someone to do it for you. I’ll give you an example. You have a product or service you want to sell, you have worked hard to make it really compelling, because it is your specialty. Of course you need to have a website and make sure you come up in search results. But doing SEO and web design is not exactly your talent. You are not a designer. So rather than get someone who knows what they are doing, you design the website yourself. It’s OK, design is not good, it does not function too well, but hey at least it’s something up there.

You’ve just displayed your lack of talent in an area and displayed it for the world to see. You are using this to try to promote your real passion and real talent. You then try to figure out why the results are not what you expected.

Say you have great ideas, you want to star in your own show, it could be a video show on the web, a podcast, a weekly presentation. You have the talent, drive and ideas to really light up a program. But producing costs money, so you handle the production yourself. You get an old camcorder, so-so microphone, attempt to edit, etc. You are not too good at it, but it’s good enough. Once again you are promoting and displaying what you are not good at for the world to see, in an effort to get people interested in what you are really good at or passionate about.

You do this project after project. You rinse. You repeat.

Now I am all about learning, don’t get me wrong. Getting into new areas and developing new talents is great. This is not what this is about. It is about having a genuine talent and then completely surrounding it with a subpar presentation. The problem is most of the audience will stop at the presentation. If something is not well produced, not pleasing graphically, hard to get into or seems more amateur, people will immediately judge it as less then important. And this is the kiss of death as you launch anything. It could produce a path of project after project not going anywhere. You’ll get hearty thumbs up from your friends, but the real audience that matters may quickly turn away.

You are trying unbelievably hard at something you are not good at and getting little to no results.

What also happens is when you struggle with the presentation, you’ll get a bigger sense of accomplishment when you are done, because it will be quite an achievement for you. Because it is so tough and took so long. This however will not thrill the masses. Ironically what you have spent hours and sleepless nights over will seem amateurish to a savvy audience, they will think you whipped it up in a few minutes. Why? Because it is not what you are good at.

The solution is remarkably easy though, so have faith! Get others involved who have the talents you lack. It’s no secret to surround yourself with others who are more talented then you to make anything a success. A lot of people do the opposite though, surround themselves with people less talented. Volunteers with free time. Think of your career like a boat. A ton of people without skills you direct will make the boat heavy and likely to sink. A large crew of talented boaters will make your project, I mean your boat, go faster and run efficiently.

Vanity stops us from getting people on board more talented than us because we feel threatened. We want to be the top dog. Huge mistake.

Really start to think about getting some great people to help you produce. Whatever you are doing, get a person who is an excellent delivery person. You have the talent and skills and message, but get great people to help you bring it to fruition, bring it to the masses.

And also get creative on how you collaborate with these people. It is not all about money, although I always recommend hiring people to help you grow your empire because it just helps it grow faster. It can be about someone volunteering or working out a trade or anything really, just getting that talented person on your team.

Look at your current projects. Look at the part you are least good at, the part you always struggle with and are least happy with. Or the part you have never started, because you lacked the talent. The part just sitting there for months and years. How can you get someone to work on that part while you focus on the areas you really excel at?

How can you grow your empire faster by working with others who have the skills you lack?

The lack of inspiration on a weekly or daily basis has a domino effect, if we are not pushing upward, striving to hit that next level, we sometimes are sliding backward. We may be busy with work and projects, but we are staying stagnant on the same level.

Inspiration can come in many forms. Success often occurs through patterns, modeling and habits. If you look to someone for inspiration, you start to model some of what you do after them, you see clear patterns that have worked for these people and you pick up on their habits.

Some look to others for guidance and occasional inspiration and some become intensive students, almost obsessively, reading, watching and listening to everything a person produces, while taking lots and lots of notes.

In our work week we often are slammed with projects, pulled in numerous directions and can feel drained. After work we just want to relax, leaving little time or energy to actually look for some inspiring material. Or it could be the opposite, work has been slow, clients are few. But instead of learning new habits and gaining more and more inspiration, you may be just learning some new tools or doing some networking or looking for work.

Being immersed in inspiration is like working out. Except instead of exercising your body you are flexing and working out your mind. Charging it with possibilities. And like working out, you need to dive into inspiration weekly or daily. Make time for it, because it is vitally important.

Once you really start to become a student of others who have succeeded, you start to realize that you can accomplish a lot of these same goals as well.

As for me, my inspiration pool is pretty vast and deep. Off the top of my head I have followed, and continue to follow, Stephen R. Covey (8th Habit), Anthony Robbins, Timothy Ferriss (4-Hour Work Week) and David Allen (Getting Things Done). Pick up practically anything by these fab four and you will get mountains of inspiration, great tools and fantastic habits. Start with a Google and YouTube search.

A lot of people love the web and find they get a lot of inspiration from it. My advice is to unplug from the web, find a good author and read their current book or listen to their audiobook with pad in hand. Off the web and at a place you can relax and not get distracted, a place to absorb and learn.

I also have a lot of people in my personal and professional life who I gain a lot of inspiration from. Being around them is always a good thing.

Think of people in your life who you feel inspire you, and grab a coffee with them this week. Keep the inspiration in your life growing. Constantly look for books and materials that will keep you inspired and thinking about possibilities. The more you have, the higher you will reach. Make time daily or weekly for this inspiration, work out your mind and really start to flex it. If you have no time for inspiration then you may have no time to grow, personally and professionally.

So my question to you is…who is your inspiration?

A good example of this is exercise, people want to be in shape in a week. They make a commitment on Monday, work out a day or two, struggle to eat right and then jump on the scale at the end of the week. Sometimes they have lost a little or actually gained weight. Oh my that has got to sting! But then they give up. Done.

It’s important to realize that a delay of your goal and outcome is not a denial, actually not doing it is a denial.  A delay of the payoff is often needed. Once you add time you have much more chances for success.

A lot of people ask me, where do I come up with the ideas for this blog and my show? Most of the time it involves note taking during reading and listening. Also when thoughts pop into my head. As I learn, I jot stuff down, all the time. Now the idea may not be immediately applied. But it plants a seed. A technique that I can think about, save to reflect on, share with others down the road or implement when it is more appropriate. As such I have amassed a large collection of ideas and career development advice, a pretty fertile garden of thoughts that I can pick from. Quite different from zoning out at a blank page and wracking my brain trying to come up with an idea, concept or method that I want to share with my audience or help out a friend or client with.

Delaying the payoff is not bad, as long as you are working toward it. A truly abundant garden of prosperity comes from careful planting, care, weeding out what is not needed, attention and focus. If everything was quickly and easily achieved, everyone would be super successful, have a huge audience, be amazingly wealthy and swimming in abundance.

We talked about Starting Monday, the problem there was delaying the start. This concept here is to delay the end, don’t rush toward it, nurture and build. Think big but think long term. Like anything that grows, the more you put into it, the bigger it will get.

I mentioned blogging earlier, I have to say I have had several blogs over the years. I would get all fired up and blog several days in a row, then get busy and not blog for a week or two. Lose my audience, blog again, work to get them back. See interest, see it drop, lather, rinse, repeat. I realized that making a commitment to blog weekly, several days a week, was consistently steady and kept things building and growing just as I wanted it.

I also realized that in the past if I was not planting, growing and harvesting I was letting myself down, starting from scratch all the time and most importantly letting my audience down. If you are in tune with these concepts I am talking about weekly, you know that building an audience is one of our key concepts, bringing our craft to the masses.

Also remember that when it is cloudy and rainy, that is when lots of things you have planted in the past can begin to really grow. You may be seeing some green ($$) more often than you anticipated if lots of things are growing over time.

OK I think I have overdone the gardening references…

This is a process that takes refinement and one I have learned over the years. I will tell you it does take practice. Planting seeds for future success. Now if I could just get good at actual gardening (like the real kind, with leaves and plants) that would be nice as well.

Are you looking for quick results? Or are you working (planting) systematically towards your goals and plans, putting the time into it that will give you the results you want to get out of it?

Do you have a creative career green thumb?